Today, we have to save more than the endangered
plants. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.

An essay by Paul Alan Cox in
a recent issue of Science magazine raises a
point about endangered species that I hadn't really
thought about before. I'd like to try this one out
on you.

Cox is director of the National Tropical Botanical
Garden in Hawaii. He tells of visiting Epanesa
Mauigoa, an elderly Samoan woman. He tells of
sitting with her, typing on his laptop while she
talked about herbal medicines. The conversation
stretched out over weeks. In the end she gave him
121 herbal remedies. One was for a disease she
called fiva samasama (Samoan for
hepatitis)! She used an extract from the
wood of the homalanthus stem.

When the US National Cancer Institute learned of
that one, they sent a team in to study it. The
homalanthus stem has yielded a new antiviral drug,
prostratin, and it's being studied as a
possible cure for AIDS. If it succeeds, half the
royalties are promised to the people of Samoa.

Much has been said about vanishing species of
healing herbs. Cox himself notes that half the
plant species in the Hawaiian Islands are on the
edge of extinction. But Cox is concerned about more
than just the extinction of plants. Without Epanesa
Mauigoa, we wouldn't have prostratin, even if
homalanthus survived.

Suppose the people of our world were suddenly
replaced with people from the fourteenth century.
How would they react? They'd wander among our
machines not knowing what they did or what they
were for. All our high technology would rust away
while they moved into the countryside to recreate
their old agrarian world.

That actually happened before in human history. As
nomadic tribes moved into what'd once been the
Roman Empire, they ignored the great buildings,
roads, and support systems. They went about life as
they knew it while vines grew over the great works
of Rome.

Cox is really likening us to those seventh-century
nomadic tribes. We jet about the world bringing our
new technical culture into its far corners. The
next generation of Samoans will no longer carry the
knowledge of 73-year-old Epanesa Mauigoa. What she
and others like her know is being lost even more
rapidly than the plants from which she once made
her medicines.

The terrible irony is that it would be monstrously
self-serving to deny any people entry into the
modern high-technology world we enjoy. We cannot
isolate and freeze other cultures just to preserve
their knowledge for our use.

The 1992 Convention of Biological Diversity
established protocols for protecting and sharing
these resources. They set goals for respecting,
encouraging, and sharing traditional culture and
knowledge. But I have a gnawing concern that it's
too little, too late. I suspect that our
grandchildren will walk among the old plants much
as barbarians walked past the old ruins -- no
longer able to see what they had once meant.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.